


Stained

by Endeni



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Blanket Permission, Gen, POV Female Character, Podfic Welcome, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24901666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Endeni/pseuds/Endeni
Summary: In order to move forward, we must return to the past.
Kudos: 5
Collections: Focus on Female Characters





	Stained

**Author's Note:**

> Not betaed, so feel free to point out any issues. ;)

Leia was born the day the Empire was. She was in her twenties when she witnessed its end.

She’s forty now and she’s watching her son leave to go train and become... something she never allowed herself to be. A Jedi.

History books tend to see the years of the Empire as a brief, unfortunate aberration, a parenthesis between the glory and freedom of the Republic. 

Evil has been defeated and the heroes have won again.

Leia knows better.

It’s not a parenthesis. It’s a stain, permanent and impossible to completely wash off. 

She knows, because she tried. Mon tried, as Chief of State of the New Republic, just as Leia herself tried when she succeeded her. 

Generations of people lived under the Empire. Like her, they grew up with Imperial propaganda. Or maybe they just learned to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths, trained themselves to become indifferent.

Some thrived, profited from the Empire. 

Many missed it still.

She’s been called indecisive and her government weak.

People forgot Alderaan and the Death Star and that living under a powerful regime means relinquishing control over their own life.

She sees it whenever a new crisis emerges, some agricultural or industrial instability that means a rising of prices and lowering of job opportunities. She sees it in the eyes of people around her, the growing suspicion, paranoia, hate.

Order, they say. Justice. 

When they mean: discipline and conformity. They mean: there’s no space for non-humans, there’s barely any space for _us_.

Us. Us against them.

She sees the broken remains of the Empire, exiled to the outer edge of the galaxy but never truly vanished. She sees it grow stronger and bolder every day, gain traction and reliability. 

She sees it all and yet she’s unable to stop it.

Meanwhile, her son turns into something other than himself. Not a Jedi but a killer, a monster.

The end of her boy, just like Leia saw in her vision years ago.

She stopped her training then, curbed her contacts with Luke, with the Force, tried to keep her boy with her as long as she could.

She tried to protect him, even from himself. Until it became too much, his power too wild for her to handle on her own and she had to give way to Luke and his school.

Maybe if she hadn’t done it... Maybe all she’s done is turn her unformed fears and confused glimpses of the future into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sitting at her desk, Leia sighs and allows herself a brief moment of despair.

Then she signs her approval to Poe’s mission and watches again a familiar tale play out, the good guys ready to stand against evil.

It’s not a Rebellion this time, it’s a Resistance. And even if they have no Jedi with them, she may know how to find one. The last one.

They need an icon, a mythological figure to show them the way, to ferry them to victory.

A hero can’t win a war alone. Just like a villain can’t enslave an entire civilization without the complicity of its people, or at least some degree of it.

Life isn’t just black and white, right and wrong.

It’s shades of grey.

Her son is lost. Maybe he can be found again.

Her brother is a hero, but he’s tired and crushed with disillusionment. Maybe Leia can help him and let him help her. 

People might forget... about the stain in their collective history, about their own culpability and their own role in the mess they’re in now: the New Order and the Resistance. 

But Leia remembers. Maybe it will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet contains a not at all subtle nod to Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce and his famous 'parenthesis' thesis, postulating that fascism was a mere parenthesis in the history of Italy.


End file.
